Press Release

Richard Stockton College of New Jersey

Atlantic County ETTC

November 4, 2001

The Verizon Foundation has awarded a grant for $50,000 to the Atlantic County ETTC at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey to implement a project titled “The World Comes to Your Classroom.” The grant is one of five awards statewide for Verizon’s new Edlink New Jersey program which seeks to improve educational technology use statewide. Stockton is the only college to receive an Edlink New Jersey award this year. Competition for the grant program was keen, with over 60 organizations submitting pre-proposals this June.

The project will help schools nationwide better use their video-conferencing facilities. The ETTC will offer K-12 schools a rich array of content that schools can register for – as in-class experiences for students, and professional development opportunities for their teachers. Project partners include the New Jersey Department of Education, the Middlesex County ETTC, Stockton’s Holocaust Resource Center and the Garden State Distance Learning Consortium. Videoconferencing over ISDN and ATM will be supported through the countywide network created by the Atlantic County Library.

Each video-conferencing program will include a multimedia front-end and follow-up web resources. Proposed topics include: Holocaust and genocide education, character education, multicultural awareness, school safety, mathematics across the curriculum, hands-on science and more.

One planned series is “Show me the Math” and “Show me the Science” workshops where a professional will explain how he or she uses a specific math or science concept in their job. Examples could include the use of fractions to determine how much lumber to purchase for a house or the use of statistics to design a casino floor. Workshops will be aligned to specific math and science standards.

A partial list of Stockton faculty and staff involved in the project is available at ettc.stockton.edu/videoconf.html

Events will be videotaped, digitized and made available for “re-play events” to Atlantic County teachers through a new video distribution server at the Atlantic County Audio Visual Aids Commission.

The Atlantic County Educational Technology Training Center (ETTC) is a consortium of 42 public school districts, charter schools and non-public schools in Atlantic, Cape May and Ocean counties administered by the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. The ETTC provides professional development for K-12 educators through a public calendar of workshops as well as custom onsite events, and manages a state-of-art distance learning demonstration center. The Atlantic County ETTC has previously been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New Jersey State Systemic Initiative and the New Jersey Department of Education.

For more information on this project, please contact Anu Vedantham, Director of the Atlantic County ETTC at (609) 652-4931 or visit the ETTC website at www.ettc.stockton.edu